Brian Williams is facing online criticism for waxing poeticabout what he called "beautiful pictures" of U.S. missileslaunching during an attack on a Syrian air base.

Video released by the military shows Tomahawk missiles targetedfor a Syrian airfield launching from the decks of U.S. warshipsin the Mediterranean Sea on Thursday.

During his MSNBC program, "The 11th Hour," late Thursday night,Williams said the "beautiful pictures at night" tempted him toquote a line from a Leonard Cohen song:"I am guided by the beauty of our weapons."He went on to call the images "beautiful pictures of fearsome armaments."

Williams was quickly mocked and criticized on Twitter for the remarks,with some users suggesting they were insensitive to the realities of war. . .====

http://www.nj.com/entertainment/index.ssf/2017/04/brian_williams_calls_missile_beautiful_syria_msnbc.html--------------. . . Williams, who grew up in Middletown [NJ] and was famouslydismissed from "NBC Nightly News" after he was suspended forsix months in 2015 for his "misremembered" account of hisexperiences during the Iraq War (he said he had conflatedhis memories of the time), is raising eyebrows once again. . .====

First we take Manhattan. Then we take Berlin.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0rZ2CPCYBQ

We now know how many cruise missiles it takes to turn youfrom pariah to respected member of the Americanforeign policy establishment: 59 — the number President Trumpfired on a Syrian government airfield on Thursday.“I think Donald Trump became president of the United States,”the CNN host Fareed Zakaria gushed. . .

In the coming weeks, we’ll have a long debate over where Americais headed in the Middle East. But the question that historianswill ask, decades from now, is how those 15 years of flailingfailed to teach us anything. . .

Americans understood Vietnam to be a grievous defeat that requiredfresh thinking. In the 1970s, they set out on a long reckoningwith its consequences, pioneering the promotion of human rightsand asserting congressional control over war powers.

No remotely comparable reckoning has followed the Iraq war. . .

Mr. Obama, of course, opposed the war, a stance that propelledhis rise to power. But like most critics, he laid blame forthe war on George W. Bush’s administration and its supposedlyabnormal arrogance. . .

So when Mr. Obama took office, he and most of his supporters actedas though the change at the top had put the problem to rest. . .

The Obama years produced a paradox: Opposition to the Iraq warbroadened, but it did not deepen. By 2014, a record low 18 percentof Americans judged it worth the costs, according to aCBS News/New York Times poll. Yet no antiwar politics followed. . .

Which is why, in 2015, Mr. Trump could run a second antiwar campaign,tapping into the reservoir of confusion, anger and grief over Iraq.In Bush-friendly, pro-military South Carolina, Mr. Trump blastedthe war as possibly the “worst decision” in American history.“We have destabilized the Middle East,” he said, and caused therise of the Islamic State and conflicts in Libya and Syria. . . — proofthat voters could trust him as commander in chief and ignore thechorus of national security experts who deemed him unfit.

The proof was faulty. . . America’s great mistake was to confusehis political calculation with wisdom.

Now, having intensified American military involvement in Iraq,Syria and Yemen, Mr. Trump may wind up repeating his predecessor’spattern of anti-Iraq-war campaigning and perpetual-war governing. . .====

Donald Trump has turned his back on pretty much everything hehas ever said about United States military involvement in Syria. . .

“It is in this vital national security interest of theUnited States to prevent and deter the spread and use ofdeadly chemical weapons.”

This has echoes of the George W. Bush warning about Saddam Hussein’s“weapons of mass destruction,” a lie that led us into a neardecade-long war.

Not to be indelicate here, but atrocities happen in the world allthe time (and have happened on an even larger scale before in Syria).Humans are capable of unimaginable cruelty. Sometimes thevictims die quickly and are made visible by media for the worldto see. Other times, they die in slow motion, out of sight andout of mind. Sometimes banned weapons are used;sometimes conventional weapons; sometimes, neglect,isolation and starvation.

And the world in general, and America in particular, has a wayof being wishy-washy about which atrocities deserve responsesand which ones don’t. These decisions can be capricious at bestand calculated camouflages for ulterior motives at worst.

It’s easy to sell the heroism of a humanitarian mission or the fearof terror or the two in tandem, as Trump attempted in this case.

The temptation to unleash America’s massive war machine is seductiveand also addictive. Put that power in the hands of a man like Trump,who operates more on impulse and intuition than intellect, and theworld should shiver.

The problem comes when the initial glow dims and darkness descends. . .

Market Watch reported last week, “It could cost about$60 million to replace the cruise missiles that the U.S. militaryrained on Syrian targets Thursday night,” but Fortune reportedthat shares of weapons manufacturers, as soon as they begantrading Friday, were “collectively gaining nearly $5 billionin market value.”

War is a business, a lucrative one. . .

[W]e take down a bad leader in some poor country. In theory,this helps the citizens of that country. But. . . it often createsa vacuum where one bad man can be replaced by even worse men.

We. . . then. . . have to make an impossible choice: stayand try to fix what we broke or abandon it and watch our nightmares multiply.

Nobility of the crusade is consumed by the quagmire.

[W]e would all do well to temper the self-congratulatory war speechesand thrusting of pom-poms of our politicians and pundits. . .

As righteous as we may feel about punishing Assad, Syria is ahornet’s nest of forces hostile to America: Assad, Russia, and Iranon one flank and ISIS on another. You can’t afflict one factionwithout assisting the other. In this way, Syria is a nearly unwinnable state.

We’ve been down this road before. Just over the horizon is a hill:Steep and greased with political motives, military ambitions,American blood and squandered treasury. . .====

[S]howy actions that win a news cycle or two are no substitutefor actual, coherent policies. Indeed, their main lasting effectcan be to squander a government’s credibility. Which brings us tolast week’s missile strike on Syria.

The attack instantly transformed news coverage of the Trump administration.Suddenly stories about infighting and dysfunction were replaced withscreaming headlines about the president’s toughness and footage ofTomahawk launches. . .

No doubt the Assad forces took some real losses, but there’sno reason to believe that a one-time action will have any effecton the course of Syria’s civil war.

In fact, if last week’s action was the end of the story, the eventualeffect may well be to strengthen the Assad regime — Look, theystood up to a superpower! — and weaken American credibility.To achieve any lasting result, Mr. Trump would have to get involvedon a sustained basis in Syria.

Doing what, you ask? Well, that’s the big question — and the lackof good answers to that question is the reason President Barack Obamadecided not to start something nobody knew how to finish.

No, we haven’t learned that Mr. Trump is an effective leader.Ordering the U.S. military to fire off some missiles is easy.Doing so in a way that actually serves American interests is thehard part. . .

Just days before the strike, the Trump administration seemed tobe signaling lack of interest in Syrian regime change.

What changed? The images of poison-gas victims were horrible, butSyria has been an incredible horror story for years. Is Mr. Trumpmaking life-and-death national security decisions based on TV coverage?

One thing is certain: The media reaction to the Syria strike showedthat many pundits and news organizations have learned nothing frompast failures.

Mr. Trump may like to claim that the media are biased against him,but the truth is that they’ve bent over backward in his favor.They want to seem balanced, even when there is no balance; they havebeen desperate for excuses to ignore the dubious circumstances ofhis election and his erratic behavior in office, and start treatinghim as a normal president.

You may recall how, a month and a half ago, pundits eagerly declaredthat Mr. Trump “became the president of the United States today” becausehe managed to read a speech off a teleprompter without going off script.Then he started tweeting again.

One might have expected that experience to serve as a lesson.But no: The U.S. fired off some missiles, and once againMr. Trump “became president.”. . . The Trump administration now knowsthat it can always crowd out reporting about its scandals and failuresby bombing someone. . .====